Montreal in winter is no place for the weak or the unprepared, and I learned that the hard way during a week I spent up there, freezing my ass off and running into a crew of cold weather rescue operators who looked like they’d seen things that would make a lesser person weep into their parka.

The back of their Rivian was packed floor to ceiling with blue bags. I had to ask. You always have to ask.

Medical kits, they told me.

“We get them for free,” one of them said, dead-eyed and honest the way only people who routinely pull bodies out of snowdrifts can be, “but I’d spend money on them if I had to.”

That’s all I needed to hear. That’s all anyone should need to hear. When the people who scrape the frozen and the foolish off the landscape tell you something is worth paying for, you write it down and you act on it and you don’t ask a lot of stupid follow-up questions.

Details here.